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It’s all coming together now. We had a lovely afternoon with Anne on Saturday and came home with a sewing machine and a load of firewood. On Sunday, as promised we went to the boat show at Crick. We were there two years ago; then we spent most of our time looking at all the lovely boats and dreaming. This time we were on a mission. We had done a power audit of all the 12V equipment on the boat and worked out our average current draw. Based on the UK average sunshine hours per year, plus our 6 or so hours boating a week, we’d calculated what size panels we’d need to (mostly) keep up with us. We’d also measured the new cratch board and plank, written down all the questions we needed to ask BW, knew what colour scheme we had in mind, and had a list of all the chandlery items Legend could do with.

After talking to as many serious looking solar salesmen as we could stomach, we sat down with our sandwiches and ruthlessly slashed through the realms of glossy paper we had somehow failed to avo…

It’s been a week of mechanical ups and downs. This is Dave’s latest Heath Robinson affair. Last week we decided that having Legend’s diesel injectors serviced would be a good thing. It’s got a smoky exhaust and we wanted to see if we could improve things before we went through any tunnels. We phoned a couple of boatyards further up the canal and arranged for a bloke called Ray to come out to us and take them away to be looked at. As the Girls and Boys were coming boating on Sunday we thought it would be prudent to leave it till this week. Also on the agenda for this week was Ken’s MOT.

So after an exciting day’s boating in the wind on Sunday with Chloe, Shandy, Frankie and Harry as locking/pub testing crew, we moored up at Great Linford. Boating through Milton Keynes is highly enjoyable and a world away from driving through it. Apart from a couple of big concrete bridges there is very little to let you know that anything but Green and Pleasant is out there. Frankie & Harry went ho…

We moved up to Three Locks this week. Mum and Dad came along to help and stayed the night. It’s a lovely spot, there are ducklings moorhen chicks, a beautiful pair of Mandarin ducks and a constant supply of hire-boaters from Leighton Buzzard encountering their first lock. It's not a staircase, just a flight of three, but it's still pretty daunting to come round a corner and find that lot in front of you.

Dave has nearly finished the well deck locker, there was a tense moment when we thought it wouldn’t go into the well deck, but it just fitted.. He then spent most of the week painting it. It’s going to be red, even though we quite liked the look of it in grey undercoat. While the paint was drying he fitted new seals and vents to our toilet cassettes and fixed the electric flush. It’s a rich, carefree life on a boat.

We've got the power.

When boaters get together it doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn to amps, volts and watts. How much you’ve got, how much you need and …

May Bank Holiday Monday dawned bright but very breezy. If it had just been us two we would have abandoned boat moving plans and gone for a brisk walk instead, but we’d arranged for Karen, Andrew and the kids to come with us, so we reckoned that with extra crew it wouldn’t be that bad. As it turned out it was fine. There were a couple of places where we had to use everyone to push off, but we arrived at Grove without any major worries. On Tuesday evening Dave’s sister Kate came for a visit. She was to be our first overnight guest and would be the guinea pig for our new sofa. Frankie & Harry were coming over for tea as well and they all managed to arrive at once. A very happy evening,

We took Kate for a little boat trip on Wednesday; down one lock, onto Leighton Buzzard visitor moorings for lunch and a wander round, then back up to Grove. We had an empty and fill up at the sanitary point, just like being back in Ken!

The Easter camp was fun,
we got to see all our mates from 2CV land and we went back to our old house to see Pete & Michelle. It was lovely to find them so happy at No 3; they’ve got more chickens and ducks than we ever had, and they’ve got rabbits and 3 adorable pigs as well. It gave us a good feeling to know that someone else has taken what we started there, and is moving forward with it. It was good to see Jon & Jenny and Cathy - our former neighbours - as well. The little community in Gedney Broadgate lives on!

We went to the Easter camp in Poubelle on Good Friday; the plan was to go to a camping shop on the way and get 2 new sleeping bags, however we were 10 minutes late, so we spent the first night under our fleece blankets and Poubelle’s big curtain. On Saturday Chloe gave us a lift to Sutterton Camping where we found two very nice 300gsm bags with cotton linings and opposite zips. Perfect. To make it even better they couldn’t find the stuff bag for one of them, so they…

When we met we had dreams of a narrowboat but life took over and our boating plans got put on hold. We never forgot our dream though; we borrowed a boat for a couple of trips, had a hire boat holiday and promised that ‘One day we’ll do it’. The kids moved on and moved out and it was just the pension left to tie us. Then Dave got made redundant and the final tie was cut. We needed the money from the house to buy a boat and didn’t want to buy the first one we saw just for somewhere to live, so we bought a campervan. We sold the house and, in a state of freedom between mortgage and mooring fees, went on an eight month friends and relations tour of Europe, New Zealand and Australia.
When we got back we went boat hunting. We found one called Legend that ticked all our boxes and we moved aboard in April 2011. We’re Continuous Cruisers which means we don’t have a permanent mooring and can stay up to 14 days before moving on, so we’re slowly exploring the 2,000 miles of England’s waterways. This is a log of our journey; selling a house and its contents, going around the world and then learning how to live in a tin can. It’s been emotional. It’s been an adventure. It’s still going.